Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Me: We should do Scrabble lunches every once
in a while, now that we're in the same neck of the woods, and all.

P1: Scrabble lunches are an excellent idea,
as soon as I remember I'll bring my board into my office. I also need to get a
copy of the new dictionary next time I do an Amazon order, so I can drop
"chillax" and "vlog" on your ass. :)

Okay. It’s time I came clean
with all of you. I have a secret addiction. It tends to manifest
late at night, but it can sneak into other parts of my day, as well.
Sometimes it steals my focus. Often, I try to resist, but I still succumb
-- if only a little -- practically every day. Terrible as it sounds, I’ve
been addicted since the age of seven or eight… and it was my own father who led
me down this path.

I’m talking, of course, about my
Scrabble habit.

That’s right, Scrabble® -- that
Hasbro board game with the little tiles that have letters and numbers on
them. More specifically, that game with one hundred tiles, including
twelve E’s, nine A’s, nine I’s, eight O’s, four U’s, and (thankfully) only one
Q. Yes, I could tell you the frequencies of the other twenty letters
(plus two blanks). I could also tell you all their point values, and in
which valid two-letter words each letter appears (fore or aft), as sanctioned by
the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. I could offer up the words that
include the Q without requiring the presence of a pesky U. I could even
tell you what “QAID” actually means, although that, of course, is irrelevant1.

I realize that being addicted to
Scrabble probably isn’t as damaging as being addicted to
methamphetamines. Nor is it as heart-rending as being addicted to love or
as irritating as being addicted to Farmville. Nonetheless, I do find
myself wondering whether there’s any way I can honestly justify the time and
mental energy I waste on shuffling around my letters looking for a way to get
the K onto the triple letter score, or (having found the obvious bingo)
checking to make sure there isn’t a better bingo. Should I really
have felt such a heady surge of glee last week when I decorated a triple-word-score
with the word SHITLESS?

I started my obsession so early in
life that I’m not entirely sure how I slipped into it. My family had an
old-school version of the game, with folding cardboard board and plastic tiles,
and I suppose my parents played occasionally. At some point, maybe on a
rainy Saturday when my sister was old enough to reasonably participate in the
game -- and I blatantly wasn’t -- we sat down to play as a foursome.
Someone must have told me the rules. Make words. They have to be
connected to one another. They have to be correctly spelled. You can’t
accidentally create additional combinations such as “GJ” or
“ZULUQBASKETRY”. Mommy and Daddy know way more words than you do.
So does Sarah. You will lose. Badly.

Looking back, I’m not sure why an
activity that demanded skills I (like most seven-year-olds) patently lacked (a
vast vocabulary, strong strategic powers, the ability to spell one’s way out of
a paper bag, and a penchant for sitting still for more than fifteen seconds)
held such immediate appeal to me. My big sister soon lost interest in the
game. My mother, who was always busy doing more than her share of the
chores and childcare, seemed happy to back out. So I played with
Daddy. And played. And played.

My father took the game
seriously. Dad takes ALL games seriously, including bridge, backyard
croquet, and Fictionary. Thus, even though he was taking on a fifty-pound
scabby-kneed opponent, he played to win. Without a doubt, the
scores in our first head-to-head game – and in the next, and the next, and the
one after that – were something like 295 to 112, or 347 to 86.
Peculiarly, I was unfazed.

Although playing Scrabble with Dad
was largely a silent experience, it could be an intensely emotional one.
Dad brooked very little of the kind of table-talk that gave any hint as to what
letters we held. However, he didn’t have even the vaguest approximation
of a poker face – or a Scrabble face – and he knew it. A bad draw from
the bag left him tearing his Einstein-esque hair and muttering the sort of
imprecations that greatly improved my stock of short, efficient, valid Scrabble
plays. A rack with bingo-potential set him madly shuffling. When he
plonked down something really superb, his joy was so palpable it practically
skipped around the board singing show tunes. Dad was often so amused by weird
or salacious combinations of tiles that he sat there giggling at his letters –
and scribbled them down to show me later.

My father did (somewhat grudgingly)
allow me free access to the dictionary, so that I could check my spelling – but
only until I was old enough to occasionally (but increasingly) beat him.
From the start, I was sternly told that I was not permitted to go fishing
through the dictionary, searching for likely possibilities. Nor was I
allowed to read the dictionary and memorize useful words in my free time.
That’s right -- my own parent forbade me to increase my vocabulary, because he
didn’t want me to best him at a board game. The fact that he needed to
forbid such behavior at all highlights the fact that I was not only a
hopelessly odd child, but also already an addict.

That was more than thirty years
ago. These days, no one can stop me from reading the dictionary, should I
choose to do so. I don’t… mostly. But the fifth edition came out last month.I hear it includes DA. GI. PO. and TE2.

Me: If you manage to play "chillax"
I'll give you an automatic win. I guess I could remember to bring my
board. And my pathetic old dictionary

P1: Naw, your board gets plenty of use at
your house, mine not so much. It'll be more useful here at work. And your
pathetic old dictionary was a gift from me, as I recall, so a little more treasuring
is perhaps in order!

Me: Right. I'll go home and fondle the
dictionary this evening, lovingly caressing ZA and QI in your honor. I'm
writing a blog post about Scrabble. Can't believe it's taken me this
long.

Like all good addicts, I tell myself
that it’s No Big Deal. I can quit. I can stop whenever I
want. Right after this next move. Or, you know, the end of this
game…

There have been periods in my life
when I’ve been forced by circumstances to go cold-turkey – such as when the
U.S. Peace Corps sent me to Jamaica. Jamaica, of course, is officially an
English-speaking nation, but in the rural hills, where I was working with kids
on school gardens, only patois was spoken, and even basic literacy was
limited. No one seemed likely to be familiar with common terms such as
QWERTY3 and LEZ4. I went through withdrawal.

I’m not sure how or why I saw a
notice about a National Jamaican Scrabble Championship – it must have been when
I was in Kingston on Peace Corps business – but, perhaps inevitably, I rode
three different chicken-crowded buses to get to Spanishtown, the nearest site
in which I could compete. I was eliminated in the second round, in a
tie-breaker game against an elderly woman whose husband had been knocked out in
round one. They were a charming couple. They were retired teachers.
They raised goats. They invited me, the utterly-out-of-place white
22-year-old, to their home for a meal. I felt mothered, and fathered, and
delightfully Scrabbled. It was wonderful. But they lived too far
away for regular games.

I found only one other Scrabble
partner in my two and a half years overseas. He also lived too far away,
but I rode my bike to his village, anyhow, over (I seem to recall) several
mountains. He was Nigerian. He was twenty-eight years old,
dazzlingly brilliant, and spoke five languages better than I spoke one.
The Scrabble was great.

All this was pre-internet (or, for
the quibblers among you, it was prior to the era in which I personally had
useful access to the internet, in which “useful” is taken to mean “Scrabble”).
The Age of Information changed everything. Back in the early 80’s, Dad
and I thought we were pretty cool to upgrade to a Deluxe Edition, complete with
a smooth-spinning plastic turntable. In the ‘00s, any fool could play on
a computer – or, for that matter, against a computer.

I went through a phase (centered
around a desperate stage of PhD procrastination) when, yeah, I’ll admit it – I
used the internet for the perverse pleasures that it offered. I could play with
strangers – although I declined to do so.I could play with androids!Oh,
what the heck, yes, yes!

What can I say -- it was free.
It was at my fingertips. It was also demoralizing. Not so much
because the computer was able to shoot moves at me with a speed that gloated,
“Your clunky synapses can never match my microprocessors.” Not so much
because I almost always lost, either. After all, I’d chosen to play at the
hardest possible setting; I could have set the darned program to “moron” and
enjoyed victory after victory. I just… well… I found that I kind of
prefer the real thing. You know – doing it with a human.

What? Real live interaction?
It hardly seems possible that agonizing over whether to risk using up all ones
vowels for an extra eight points, or obsessively seeking the elusive
double-triple-word-score-bingo can be a stepping-stone toward any sort of
functional social behavior. And yet…sorting back through my life, I start
to see a pattern. I’m beginning to suspect that for decades, I’ve been
using Scrabble not only as a delightful math-meets-English-meets-strategy
decadent brain-stretcher, but also for exactly this nefarious and unspeakable
purpose: human connection.

It started with Dad, of
course. My father has always been an intellectual to the core. Small-talk
bores the crap out of him, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly -- or even
gracefully. He was never one of those “let’s-toss-a-ball-around” dads, or
a “let’s-work-on-a-building-project” dad. He was more of a
“let’s-analyze-the-political-situation-in-Iran” dad, which can be tough to
connect with, if one happens to be four years old. Thus, by the time I
reached second or third grade, I was desperately eager to find some way to bond
with Daddy. And then I found it. Brows furrowed and tiles clicking,
we bonded.

Decades later, I’m pretty sure that
Scrabble was the excuse whereby I first invited over a guy (I’ll call him
Player One) I’d met backstage among the other extras in Julius Caesar. At
least, I think this is the case, but there’s so much friendship under the
bridge that – twelve years of hikes, bike rides, ski trips, and international
family vacations later -- it’s hard to recall. Still, our mutual
addiction is undeniable. Case in point: Player One was dubious as to his
tolerance for babies, and openly displayed his trepidation when I told him,
back in ’05, that I was incubating TWO such creatures. Nonetheless, on
more than one occasion he willingly sat across from me at a card table while I
not only held twin babies, but actually nursed both squirming
creatures simultaneously, locking them in place with my elbows while I shuffled
my tiles. Because – Scrabble.

I felt a bit better about the
relative depths of my depravity when I read a book (borrowed from Player One,
of course) entitled “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in
the World of Competitive Scrabble Players”. These twitchy,
basement-dwelling psychiatric cases were nothing at all like me, right?
Right?

Meanwhile, my recurring Scrabble
itch also made me reach out, six or seven years ago, to a buddy from junior
high. We hadn’t spoken in years – but there he was, shuffling his tiles
on Facebook! Well, technically, we still haven’t spoken in (even
more) years, but these days he’s not only my most frequent Scrabble opponent,
he’s also my most frequent mountain-time-insomniac online chat friend – and my
blog editor. He knows way too much about everything, so I can’t talk smack
about him.

[You
could talk smack about me, if it was funny – ed.]

I also play a game or two (or five,
or ten) with three other friends – making (for the math challenged) six of us
in total. We’re a mixed bunch. Some of us have used actual ulus and
worn actual qiviut; some have merely used those words to dump awful
racks. Some see me so frequently that they could easily capture my every
feature for a police sketch-artist. Some would probably stride right past
me on a crowded sidewalk, oblivious. We’re all chronically nerdy, of course
– that’s a tragic and unavoidable a side effect of being friends with me -- but
our background, gender, education, income level, marital status, and
occupations vary widely. (Note: friends are always more fun when their genders
vary widely). What, then, do we all have in common?

In answering that, I now realize, I
may be able to shed a few more lumens on my own lifelong obsession.

Can I justify the time and energy I
spend on a hobby so patently unproductive that it has resulted in my knowing
which words can be prefixed with UN- and which with RE-? Well…
maybe. Because maybe – just maybe – I’ve learned a few things from
Scrabble that have nothing to do with how to spell the names of all the Greek
and Hebrew letters.

Somewhere along the way, those
frustrating little tiles taught me to play like it matters -- but to know in my
heart that it doesn’t. Some of my opponents beat me more often than
others. Some care more than others. All of us, however, walk a
middle ground between self-torturing-angst and don’t-give-a-damn. We care
enough to play with integrity. We play to win. We play
wholeheartedly. And yet, conversely, none of us care so much that we
sulk, or mope, or give up, or cease to have fun, or put the game ahead of the
friendship. All of us know that there’s a lot of luck involved. Sometimes
– in Scrabble, as in life -- the bag gives you UIOOOOA or VVCCJKB. It
sucks. It’s not fair. But you can’t take it personally.

Dad never quite learned this
lesson. He and I don’t play anymore. Perhaps it’s because now, for
him -- suffering from Parkinson’s Disease -- online play would be just too
complex a struggle. But, in truth, I started beating him too often some
years ago. I memorized too much of the dictionary. I could say that
I ruined things, but… it wasn’t really me.

My Scrabble obsession taught me that
other people might not understand all my passions -- and that’s okay. I
happily married a not-at-all Scrabble-inclined human being. Spelling for
pleasure makes as much sense to Jay as bashing his toes with a ballpeen hammer
for pleasure. Some of his interests are obtuse to me, too. We don’t
have to have a hive-mind to be a couple. Indeed – it’s probably for the
best that we don’t.

P1: For extra authenticity, make sure no word
in the blog post is more than 7 letters long and contains more than 1 'z.' If
you need a visual, I saved the scoresheet from that one game where I scored
541.

Me: Seriously? Oh, by all means send it
along. I mean, a scan or whatever. Because, dork-tastic.

P1: [The next day] It turns out I actually only scored 540 in
that game. And I was going to bring the scoresheet in today to scan but I think
I left it on the kitchen table this morning. Also, might be worth noting that I
had hoped nursing while playing would put you at a competitive disadvantage,
but I don't think that worked out. :)

Over the years, Scrabble also taught
me to revel in joint high scores, even though the game is not a collaborative
one. Among my cadre of wordsmith-friends, fabulous plays from an opponent
are always greeted with genuine kudos, even if that opponent happens to be
kicking ass. MUFTI5.
Nice word! FISHNET? Hot damn! CAZIQUE6? You
just won the Internet! Scrabble taught me that skill matters; knowledge
matters; strategy matters; luck matters… but other things matter even
more. Sometimes the standard rules of politeness can be tossed aside
(because SHITLESS7 is totally a valid word), but never the rules of kindness.

And, finally, there’s this: Scrabble
taught me that no matter how many games you win or lose, ultimately you’re only
really ever playing against yourself. Ever.

1QAID (Arabic: قائد‎
qāʾid) also spelled kaid or caïd: Master or leader. A title in the Norman
kingdom of Sicily, applied to palatine officials and members of the curia,
usually to those who were Muslims or converts from Islam. (Wikipedia)

2DA. GI. PO. and TE are the four new two-letter words
added in the fifth edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.
They are defined, respectively, as “dad”, “a martial arts garment”, “a chamber
pot”, and “the musical note ti”.

3QWERTY: The name of your keyboard layout.
Because, obviously. You knew that, right?

4LEZ: A female homosexual. This word achieved the
dubious honor of being expurgated from the third edition of the Official
Scrabble Players Dictionary, along with other lovely terms such as BOOBIE, GOY,
TURD, and JISM -- to great hue and cry amongst people even more obsessive and
nerdy than myself.

5MUFTI: A mufti (Arabic: مفتي‎ muftī; Turkish: müftü)
is an Islamic scholar who is an interpreter or expounder of Islamic law.
(Wikipedia)

6CAZIQUE: A chief or petty king among some tribes
of Indians in America. (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913)